How 3rd Parties Track You Online


What is Web tracking, why it matters, and what to do about it.

The 10,000 foot view

  • Privacy is a fundamental right.
  • The Web's (current) business model is advertising.
  • Advertising calls for collecting everything, always, forever.
The Internet is a surveillance state. Bruce Schneier, security and privacy expert

What is Web tracking?

  • Web tracking is collecting everything you do online.
  • Trackers are parts of pages you visit.
  • For example, Facebook Like buttons.
  • If you click the button, we can call that "active" tracking.
  • If you don't, you still get tracked. Let's call that "passive" tracking.
    Facebook Likes can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior, 2012 University of Cambridge study

What gets passively tracked?

  • The page you are on
  • Your browser/computer info (screen size, plugins, OS version, fonts, ...)
  • Your approximate location (from IP address)
  • Anything previously stored by the tracker's domain on your computer (cookies, for example)

Google Analytics is on

70.9%

of the top
10,000 sites.


BuiltWith Trends

Building a
(permanent)
record.

To what end?

Decisions big and small


  • Which ad to show
  • Which price to offer
  • Who doesn't get the job
  • ...

What can we do about it?

  • Privacy tools can help with passive tracking.
  • Incognito/Private Browsing modes help too, but incompletely, since storing things on your computer is only part of the problem.
  • But not with what you search for, what you post, tweet, "like", "favorite", "follow", which apps you install, what you buy with credit cards, ...

Adblock Plus logo  / Ghostery logoDisconnect logoPrivacy Badger logo / ...

Resources

THE END

Alexei <alexeiatyahoodotcom@gmail.com>


ghostwords.github.io/tracking-workshop-2014/


Upcoming talk (Monday October 20th 2014):
Tracked Online: How it's done & how you can protect yourself